Optical interconnect has great importance nowadays due to the increasing demand of information data capacity. Due to its mature CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology and strong industry interests, silicon photonics integrated circuits (Si-PIC) have gained much more research interests for optical interconnection. Yet, optical interconnection using Si-PIC still faces major issues, among which the energy consumption is the most challenging one when compared to their electrical counterpart. It is even critical for an optical switch, which is one of the most important building blocks or key components in on-chip optical interconnect, in the form of optical router, ROADM (reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer), WSS (wavelength selective switch), OXC (optical cross-connect), etc. In general, an on-chip optical switch requires power supply (i.e., consumes energy) in order to maintain the “on” status, which induces relatively high standby power consumption.
There is therefore need for an optical switch that saves energy or power consumption.